My top ten books of the last decade

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Colson Whitehead, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, M. John Harrison, nina allan

I have chosen one book from each year, with the added proviso that I have chosen no more than one title per author. That is, I admit, an artificial rule, and it did give me problems on a couple of years, but it avoids the problem that the list would otherwise be dominated by the same two or three names.

Some of these were obvious from the moment I thought of doing this list (the first and last on the list, for instance), others less so, mostly when there were years in which no title really sang out to me. I was sorely tempted to list two books from one year and none from another. But if you set yourself rules, I suppose the least you can do is stick to them. So here are ten books from the last ten years. I’d be very interested tosee what your lists are.

2011
The Islanders – Christopher Priest
When I started this exercise, this was the first book I thought of. It is among the two or three very best novels Priest has written. I have read it several times now, and each time it seems fresh, each time the complexity, the daring, the humour all combine to make the book exciting and invigorating. There is always something new to discover within its maze of distortions, uncertainties, twists in time and games with identity. I reviewed the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

2012
Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
I remember the excitement of reading Wolf Hall when it first came out. I know most commentators focussed on the way the novel connected with history, the rehabilitation of Thomas Cromwell (up to that point familiarly presented as one of the villains of the age), the sense of being fully absorbed in the politics of the age. But for me what I found most engaging was the language. I wrote at Big Other about Mantel’s use of the word “he”, and what it signifies about identity and narrative voice. So now, two years later, there comes a sequel, and any fears I might have had are quickly dispelled: the same language, the same inhabitation of the age. The two books together are simply magnificent.

2013
Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
I continue to regard this book as one of the finest works of science fiction of the last decade, although, as I said when I wrote about it here, it is a book that demands not to be read as science fiction. It is a variant on an alternate history novel, but here it is a single life, a single consciousness, that is fragmented. Ursula constantly dies and is reborn, barely if at all conscious of her previous existences, but always trying to relive her life in a way that brings her closer to achieving her goal, which is the survival of her brother who, most commonly, is killed in a bomber raid over Germany during World War II. The sequel, A God in Ruins, details the emptiness of the life that is thus saved, making for an extraordinarily powerful dyptych of novels.

2014
The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Not, perhaps, his finest novel (that, surely, is Cloud Atlas), but still a vivid, beautifully realised, and always compelling novel that manages to turn the half-sensed interlinking background that has underlain all of his
previous books into the foreground of the story. And it does so without in any way undermining the faithfulness of Mitchell’s portrayal of ordinary life from the recent past to the near future. As I wrote here, it spells out the patternmaking that is Mitchell’sapproach to writing.

2015
The Thing Itself – Adam Roberts
I had a struggle with myself over Roberts’s place on this list: should his place go to The Thing Itself or to The Black Prince? If I were to subvert my own rules I would do both, without hesitation. But in the end I decided to go with The Thing Itself, partly because, while I love the way The Black Prince retells a medieval story in the manner of John Dos Passos, The Thing Itself includes a whole series of chapters recapturing literary styles that vary from 18th century prose to the work of James Joyce. It’s a joy to read, and the way the title offers a mash-up of John W. Campbell and Immanuel Kant demonstrates what a wild intellectual journey this book is.

2016
The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
Over the years, I have been in disagreement with the Arthur C. Clarke Award more often than not. I have found shortlists to be wilful and bizarre on too many occasions, but even then the right book might emerge as the winner, and this is one such. It is powerful, haunting, unforgettable, all of which I tried to compress into this piece about the book when I was on the Shadow Clarke jury.

2017
The Rift – Nina Allan
Back at the end of 2017, when I wrote my list of the year’s reading, when it came to this novel I simply put: “My book of the year.” I didn’t elaborate, I didn’t try to justify the choice, somehow it felt like I didn’t need to. This was one of those books that was just so unquestionably right that I didn’t think it needed further discussion. It still feels that way to an extent. Of course, it is a novel that ticks all my boxes, a novel of indecision, of uncertainty, a novel that could go in any direction depending upon how we choose to read it. Isn’t that what a great book is supposed to do? Well, so far as I am concerned it is.

2018
Europe at Dawn – Dave Hutchinson
Okay, I’m playing slightly fast and loose with my own rules here, in that I am using the final novel in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence to stand in for the whole series. Europe in Autumn not winning the Clarke Award was one of the occasions on which I seriously parted company with them. What I wrote about the third book, Europe in Winter, for the Shadow Clarke jury, sums up much of my feeling about the sequence, which I see as one of the most politically relevant works of science fiction we have seen for many years. And the way I see Europe at Dawn as a fine conclusion to the series is spelled out in my review for Locus.

2019
Ivory Apples – Lisa Goldstein
I admit, I have doubts about including this novel in the list. I enjoyed it immensely, and as I said in my review
for Strange Horizons, I thought it was a major work of contemporary fantasy. Yet it somehow feels, in retrospect, slighter than some of the other titles on this list. But I wonder whether that is primarily an artefact of the way 2019 felt to me, a year in which nothing seemed to blaze particularly brightly. I’ve often found that in a year of good books it is easy to spot the great ones; but in a year of mediocre books, even the good ones seem diminished. That was 2019 for me; this is a good novel, it probably deserves its place, but it wasn’t a particularly good year.

2020
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – M. John Harrison
Yeah, this is no surprise, is it? Only yesterday I was writing my massive survey of the year’s reading, and I said then that this was without doubt the novel of the year. Well, it is. It is the summation of everything we love about Harrison’s writing: the supple prose, the intense realism, the inescapable sense of the weird beginning to break in around the edges.

The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison

So, the book is real, it exists, it is sitting on my desk, it is available to be bought.

It is described thus in the blurb (which for a blessing I didn’t write myself):

Paul Kincaid’s book divides itself into a series of chronological and thematic readings of Christopher Priest’s life and work. Historical context proves itself to be key in the chronologically ordered chapters, while the thematically arranged ones provide a place to discuss islands, reality, doubles, and the arts. This duality provides an excellent space for Kincaid to use his incisive powers of critical thinking to capture the evanescence and ambivalence of Priest’s writing.

And it has attracted two wonderful comments from writers I admire intensely. M. John Harrison said:

Christopher Priest is one of Britain’s best writers: Paul Kincaid brings his considerable critical skills to this broad yet carefully focussed view of Priest’s intense and determined oeuvre.

And Adam Roberts said:

An absolutely invaluable book: not just the first critical account to cover Priest’s whole career, but the first critical engagement with Priest of any kind to provide a persuasive overall critical approach to this major but hard-to-categorise writer. Kincaid alternates a broadly chronological account of Priest’s writing life with analysis of Priest’s recurring themes and symbols, balancing these two approach such that each illuminates each, and without ever losing sight of the distinctiveness that makes Priest so important—even if part of that distinctiveness is, precisely, his resistance to conventional critical approaches. Kincaid’s critical engagement is always judicious, eloquent, often brilliant and it remains throughout sensitive to the studied ambiguities and shifting complexities of its subject. Critical writing is rarely this good.

The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest is available directly from Gylphi, or, I imagine, from any online book store.

Boundaries

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, Maureen Kincaid Speller, nina allan, Robert Holdstock, Steve Erickson

[This is, I suppose, a place holder for something I may want to explore at greater length elsewhere. But for now …]

I don’t normally listen to podcasts, I suppose I tend to be visually rather than aurally directed. But Maureen insisted that I should listen to an episode of Weird Studies, to be precise, Episode 81: Gnostic Lit: On M. John Harrison’s ‘The Course of the Heart’. She said I would enjoy it; she was absolutely right. In a sense it amplifies and runs variations on some of the things I was talking about when I discussed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again a little while ago.

One of the things that caught my attention was an opening discussion about zones, specifically referring to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (The two people hosting the podcast don’t seem to be overly familiar with Harrison’s other work, so they completely miss how closely this relates to the middle volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Nova Swing. A pity, that could have opened up a much wider and even more complex discussion.) But I found myself thinking less of the zones, however we might choose to characterise them, than of the boundaries between zones. And I realised how much of my favourite literature, the literature that for me best exemplifies the fantastic, is specifically concerned with the identification and the examination of such boundaries.

Harrison is, of course, the prime example here. The Course of the Heart concerns the relationship between mundane reality and the pleroma, here identified as the vanished land of the Coeur. Typically, the pleroma is not real and its achievement is more associated with loss than with achievement, so in Nova Swing the story moves between everyday disappointment and the unfulfilled promise of the pleroma-like zone. Exactly the same dynamic is there in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as it is in stories like “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” or, more recently, “In Autotelia”.

But it is not just Harrison who explores this boundary between the worlds. Think, for instance, of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. The edge of Ryhope Wood is exactly the sort of border between Saubade and the zone that we encounter in Nova Swing. Crossing that border, entering the wood, is less a journey into a land of myth than it is into a land of promise.

Or there is the boundary between England and the Dream Archipelago in Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation. It is not just that these are two sides of a shattered mind, it is that each is a realm of promise. To Peter Sinclair in Britain, the Dream Archipelago is the longed-for but ultimately unsatisfying pleroma; to Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, it is the other way round. As the boundaries between the two worlds become ever more porous, so the other land becomes more expressly the dream that is unfulfilled, the desire that is unsatisfied.

And there are others. The sister who disappears and then, perhaps, reappears, crosses one way and then the other across this very boundary in Nina Allan’s The Rift. The multiple Americas of Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach are separated one from the other by just such a boundary.

Of course, and it is probably rather bathetic to point this out, identifying and crossing such a boundary is commonly figured as an act of creativity. The two Peter Sinclairs are both writers, the secret of Ryhope Wood is first revealed in the pages of a diary, the story of the Coeur is imagined into life in the stories that one character tells to another. But still I can’t help thinking there is something here, something that might repay further consideration. Something to ponder upon further, I suspect.

The Everyday Abnormal

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M. John Harrison, William Golding

I have a problem reading M. John Harrison. As much as I want to keep reading, greedy for the next page and the next, I also want to stop and think and write. I want, I need, to capture something evanescent in my response. Something that disappears the moment I start writing, of course. But that’s just the way it is.

In this, as in other things, Harrison recalls one of my other all-time favourite writers, William Golding. There is, in Golding, a sense of precise observation that in itself renders what is seen demented. The sense of reality off kilter that you find in Free Fall, in Pincher Martin, in Darkness Visible, creates a world we recognise and don’t recognise in the same instant, a mad ordinariness, an everyday abnormality. And that, surely, is what is there at the core of The Course of the Heart and Light, “Egnaro” and “The Incalling”. Even when he seems to take us into space in The Centauri Device or into a distant and decaying future in “Viriconium”, Harrison’s subject is the here, the now, the twisted and distorted thing we call everyday normality, seen from a perspective that is at once clarifying and distorting. In Golding, that distortion is created by a sort of religious despair; in Harrison, I think it is just despair.

Harrison is not a fantasist, he is certainly not a science fiction writer. The space travelled in The Centauri Device can be mapped onto a run-down, depressing north of England, as can The Pastel City. Nova Swing takes us to a distant planet, a distant future, a strange region of space in name only; in truth, everything we encounter there is fixed here in the way we mythologise the past to make it into a different country. When a young man travels between England and Viriconium via a mirror in a grimy cafe, you know each is a reflection of the other. Given that the Telford of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again introduces us to Pale Meadow and the Portway and the Gorge, we could as easily have slipped through that mirror into Viriconium. I could, at one point, have taken you by the hand and walked you through the Manchester streets that form the psychogeography of The Course of the Heart (mixed with a vivid helping of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts); and I have certainly visited the Kardomah cafe that, at one time, occupied a corner of St Ann’s Square and where bits of The Course of the Heart and numerous other stories take place.

Whatever he is writing, Harrison is essentially a realist, a chronicler of the more economically and psychologically depressed areas of Britain in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. It is just that he presents these mean streets, these stunted lives, from a perspective we are not used to in our supposedly realist fiction. To live in this world engenders a sort of madness, and so the world that is seen is itself mad. These everyday abnormalities take the form of irruptions of failed magics, of displacement to other worlds that have themselves lost any sense of purpose. There can be no escape, even the most extravagant imaginations can only take us back to a form of where we are now.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, the latest iteration of Harrison’s eternal war against the failures of ordinary life, is again a version of here and now that distorts what we think we see like a menacing funfair mirror. It begins with lives shut into overcrowded one-room apartments in ill-kept, flimsily-converted old houses. It is a world where any human contact is hasty, fleeting, disordered, shaped by a basic failure to grasp the reality of people in exactly the same circumstances as ourselves. Shaw’s mother, suffering from dementia, whose repetitious speech never bears more than a tantalising, tangential relationship to what has been said to her, serves as an exemplar for all human (dis)connections throughout the book. Here we think we recognise this world, it is one with which we are all too familiar, and yet the weird, as it begins to ooze into the picture, probably belongs here more naturally than we do.

Every conversation in a Harrison novel feels like it has been snatched off the street, a fragment overheard without context, without ever hearing the whole thing. They are misheard words torn from the middle of a sentence, though with no idea what came before, what comes after, what they might be responding to. And for that precise reason they sound oracular, potent, filled with a meaning that we can only begin to guess at. And that lack of context, that sense of a meaning forever just beyond our grasp, is the circumstance in which every Harrison character finds themself. With no surety to fix our place, there is only imagination, wonder, fear with which we might pretend there is a meaning in the world. Harrison’s writing is all gaps – incomplete speeches, intangible locations – out of which we might conjure such pretend meaning.

Shaw and Victoria, the two central characters in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (I hesitate to call them protagonists since that suggests a more engaged and active role than either can manage) are archetypal inhabitants of that world of gaps and imprecision. Their ambiguous nature is reflected in their names: every time he is with her, Shaw’s mother calls him by a different forename, none of which is his; while Victoria seems to go equally by the surname Norman or Nyman. They are, like so many of Harrison’s characters, less participants in the world than observers of it. They watch the world rush by as we might look out from the windows of a speeding train, never quite sure how we ended up on this particular train to this particular destination. They do not fully belong in the world; at one point both find themselves lost in familiar surroundings, an incident that is, in each case, rewarded with an ambivalent revelation. Victoria spends a night hopelessly lost in a wood near her home, only to emerge in the morning to see her friend Pearl step naked into a pool and disappear below the water, though the pool is itself so shallow that no person could submerge in it. Shaw finds himself lost aboard a beached and derelict Thames barge, only to discover a row of glowing Victorian medicine bottles, but at that moment a naked figure, so pale it might be green, grabs him then rushes past to dive into the river, and in that moment the bottles disappear. As so often in Harrison, those moments are freighted with meaning, though we have no sure idea what that meaning might be.

Many years ago I interviewed Harrison and we talked about Climbers, which he was then close to finishing. He told me he couldn’t actually finish the novel because he was waiting for something to happen. It was something he knew would happen within the world of climbing he inhabited, but it hadn’t happened yet. When it did, he would be able to write the scene and the novel would be complete. There is something strange and profound about that revelation. It bespeaks an extraordinary fidelity to the truth, a fidelity that rings through everything he writes. But at the same time it feels like a structural version of the dialogue composed of overheards. It is there when Shaw thinks of his memories of childhood in terms of scattered but very specific images. That is how the world is composed in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again as it is in all Harrison’s fictions. The images are very precise, they speak of something real, something witnessed, something that had to happen before it could be incorporated into the work. But at the same time they are scattered, more gap than whole, and it is through those gaps that the sense of something other emerges.

Is there really something sinister about some unseen person calling repeatedly for Moira or Voya or Vita (or perhaps an ill-heard, poorly enunciated form of Victoria)? Or is it just one of those fragmentary sounds of the street that would make perfect sense if we only heard the full context? Though, of course, that is something we never can hear. But it is precisely because we are shown a world not fully inhabited, not fully contextualised, that the other, the weird, can begin to be seen by those who find themselves willynilly in the gaps. Victoria witnesses Pearl leave one world and travel to the next, as surely as the young man pushes through his mirror into Viriconium. But Viriconium, or whatever we might choose to call it (names in this novel are spells that can never be uttered with absolute confidence) is also pushing through into this world, as tenuous travellers emerge from the back room of the bar in Nova Swing. These are the greenish figures, glimpsed but never fully seen, that seem to spring out of the darkness at various times throughout the novel. These are the inhabitants of the water world encountered in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies which seems to be read by everyone; in Tim Swann’s curious website, The Water House, which seems to hold a meaning that Tim can never convey; in Annie Swann’s faded map of the world in which the colouring suggests that the land and the ocean have changed place. This world and the other intersect, but is either more complete, does either contain more connecting tissue than it does gaps? Or is it just that this world, at least as seen by those who occupy no solid place within it, has just grown thin and tattered?